This release fixes a few bugs: Bug Fixes Added a scroll view around the excludes list when it gets too long to fit on the screen. Fixed ‘Signapore’ typo. Fixed packaging to use symbolic links and remove header files (resulting in smaller app bundle size). Pick “Check for Updates” from the Arq menu to automatically [...]
Arq 1.4.2 is out!
June 4th, 2010CrashPlan restore analysis
June 1st, 2010I’m the author of Arq, a backup product for the Mac, so I’m certainly biased, but in this post I’m only going to describe the factual results of a backup/restore with CrashPlan. You can verify these results yourself. Warning: What follows is technical nitty-gritty. If you just want to know why Mac metadata are important [...]
The Importance of Metadata on the Mac
June 1st, 2010Your backup product/service should back up your data completely and correctly. This of course includes each file’s contents, but on the Mac it also includes many types of “metadata”. What are “metadata”? The general definition is “data about data”. In the case of Mac files, metadata include the file’s size, its modification date, its owner, [...]
S3 storage now 33% cheaper!
May 20th, 2010Great news! Amazon just announced “Reduced Redundancy Storage” (RRS) for S3. Objects stored with the RRS “storage class” are “99.99% durable over a given year,” whereas “standard” storage is 99.999999999% durable (overkill for backup for most people). Objects stored with RRS are only $.10/GB per month ($.11 in the Northern California region — see pricing) — [...]
Quick survey to make Arq even better
May 15th, 2010If you’re an Arq user, I’d really like to get your feedback on Arq and find out what else you’d like it to do for you. Could you please take this 5-question survey? http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2FM23K7 Fill out as much or as little as you’d like. I’ll share the response summary (minus those who don’t want their [...]
False alarm, and Arq 1.3.15
May 13th, 2010Sorry about that last blog post folks. False Alarm Turns out Arq 1.3.14 works fine. A customer had reported that his backups were gone right after he updated, and I thought I reproduced the problem, but it turns out I didn’t reproduce the problem, and furthermore it wasn’t actually a problem! The customer had pushed [...]
Arq 1.3.14 problem
May 13th, 2010[UPDATE: Ignore this post. It was a false alarm. See the following post for details.] The version of Arq that I just shipped has a bug which may cause it to drop old backup versions. To everyone who already downloaded it, I sincerely apologize, and I’m working nonstop to fix it. I recommend you re-install [...]
Arq 1.3.14 is out!
May 13th, 2010This release adds support for the Asia Pacific S3 bucket region “ap-southeast-1″ and fixes a number of bugs, including excessive memory usage and occasional temporary not-found errors on restore. Feature Additions “ap-southeast-1″ bucket region support. Bug Fixes Fixed an issue where changes to folders on remote volumes sometimes weren’t detected. Fixed the frantic behavior on [...]
Open-source Arq restore utility
April 6th, 2010We just published an open-source command-line utility for restoring your Arq backups. It’s on github: http://sreitshamer.github.com/arq_restore/ It’s very simple to use. Just type “arq_restore” to list the backed-up folders, and “arq_restore <path>” to restore from a backed-up folder. arq_restore restores from the latest backup of the folder. Our point of view is that your backups [...]
Arq 1.3.10 is out!
March 29th, 2010This release fixes several bugs: Bug Fixes Fixed an issue with superceded packs not being deleted properly, causing “pack not found” errors. Preserve selection when “OTHER COMPUTERS” node is added to the source list. Fixed an issue with backup folder names that contain characters other than letters and numbers. Remember the position of the main [...]